Resolving a Scripture reference mystery

Question

A user asked for help that Paratext was saying ‘invalid verse separator: -’ when they had verified that - was entered as the verse range separator.

I looked at the project and couldn’t see what the problem was either. Finally I noticed the curious tooltip that appeared for that box. What could “00ad002d” mean? Then it dawned on me, this tip was showing the Unicode value of the character(s) in the box. somehow this project had gotten two characters in the verse range field; 00AD (discretionary hyphen) and 002d (regular hyphen). The discretionary hyphen is not visible, so it just looked like - but Paratext was also looking for the discretionary hyphen with the - and not recognizing - by itself. When I deleted both characters from the box then typed - again, it now recognized the references.

I thought this was a nice new feature in 9.1, but I checked and it actually is there in Paratext 8. I just had not noticed it.